NamedWork: City on the Edge: Buffalo, New York, 1900-Present (Nonfiction
work)

Persons:

Reviewee: Goldman, Mark

Accession Number:

243797916

Full Text:

Goldman, Mark.

City on the Edge: Buffalo, New York, 1900-Present.

Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007.

423 pp.

ISBN: 9781591024576.

City on the Edge is Mark Goldman's third book on
Buffalo's history and his most hopeful treatment of that
city's experience of decline. Indeed, it is Goldman's interest
in that downward trajectory and what to do about it that links the three
books.

High Hopes (1983) (4) covered the full sweep of the city's
history, from its founding in the early 19th century through its
development as a commercial entrepor, to a center of heavy industry, and
to its catastrophic decline in the early post-industrial era. City on
the Lake (1990) (5) zeroed in on the period after the Second World War
and the community's struggles to come to grips with the
interlocking dynamics of suburbanization, the rise of the automobile,
racial migration and conflict, central city disinvestment, and finally
the end of three quarters of a century of industrial prosperity.

City on the Edge overlaps--one must say oddly--with the two
previous volumes, covering as it does the period from Buffalo's
zenith as an urban center at the time of the Pan American Exposition in
1901 to the beginning of the 21st century. Goldman organizes the book
roughly by decades, and each chapter treats a series of topics: broad
economic conditions, urban planning and policy, and the politics of the
city.

Goldman also deals with two themes less familiar in city histories:
the artistic and cultural development of the city and the history of the
local public education system, the latter of which is of interest
because of Buffalo's ground-breaking efforts to engineer a solution
to segregated schools. Yet it is the history of art in Buffalo that is
really a delight, from Seymour H. Knox's curatorial genius as a
patron of modern art and the embrace by others of the avant garde in
mid-20th century music, to the assembly of University at Buffalo's
famous poetry collection and the acquisition of the James Joyce papers,
to the life of the University's legendary English Department
(Barth, Fiedler, Creeley, and others).

Otherwise, Goldman hammers away on Buffalo's obvious failures
in urban planning and development from the early hollowing out of
downtown to make room for the automobile and the expansion of the
highway network at the expense of priceless Olmsted Parks, to the siting
of a new university campus in a swampy suburb and the forlorn attempts
from the Urban Renewal era forward to somehow demolish and build a way
out of decline.

However, Goldman shows little interest in either a substantive
analysis of the roots of Buffalo's economic predicament or the way
forward. Factories shut down and moved away; that's all we know. As
for the future, concepts of the new economy, creative class, and
globalization are absent. Instead, Goldman moves from an appropriate
critique of big-project redevelopment--"silver bullets" in
local parlance--to a rhapsody about the power of community gardens,
historic preservation, spontaneous redevelopment, and other grassroots
initiatives. All of these things have made a positive impact on the
city, but Goldman generally ignores the potential of developments in
health care, high technology, and higher education to create a new era
of prosperity. The power of place is important, as he argues, bur so is
a city's place in relation to the economic power of the age.

Likewise, Goldman has no theoretical interest in the dysfunction of
local politics. All the failures of recent Mayors were apparently
personal ones. Thus, there is no prescription for a fundamental remedy
to a political culture which most Buffalonians would agree has failed.
Goldman is interested in citizenship but its practice doesn't seem
to include the ballot box.

Otherwise, a reader familiar with Buffalo and its history will be
unnerved by the frequency with which Goldman misspells names and mangles
chronologies. For academic and intellectual rigor more generally, the
two earlier books are to be preferred. Yet City on the Edge contains
material that the reader is unlikely to find elsewhere, on the flowering
of the arts in Buffalo and the more recent neighborhood renaissance.

(4) Goldman, Mark. (1983). High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of
Buffalo, New York. Albany: SUNY.

(5) Goldman, Mark. (1990). City on the Lake: the Challenge of
Change in Buffalo, New York. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

Bradshaw Hovey, Associate Director of the Urban Design Project
School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, State
University of New York.